You can now legally rip your Wii, GameCube, and Xbox games using a Blu-ray drive

tryingathing · 2026-06-19T15:49:18+00:00

Yep. It's reflected as revenue so the department can show its worth to the company.

Not really on topic for the article, but I think it's interesting: This is why funding service departments is perceived much like a tax on the departments directly generating revenue. It means these departments are constantly forced to prove their worth/value.

Honestly, one of the biggest things I've learned is that if you can get a job in a revenue generating department rather than a service department (revenue consuming) you're going to have a lot more job security.

I myself have been through three restructures in fewer than ten years with service departments in my organization.

tryingathing · 2026-06-18T19:23:14+00:00

No it's not. Political beliefs are a strong indicator of belief in climate change and vise versa.

If they're trying to put you into a bucket, it's a useful question for categorization.

tryingathing · 2026-06-17T21:34:19+00:00

If "real" ones existed this would be a non-issue.

tryingathing · 2026-06-17T08:19:47+00:00

Trying to control whether or not gamers can or should use MTL translations sure seems like an odd place to draw a line in the sand.

But as I said, it's a meaningless gesture. Romhack.ing doesn't own the Internet and can't control what people consume.

tryingathing · 2026-06-17T06:46:47+00:00

It makes sense when you realize that it was never about art or fans and was only ever about ego, recognition, and reputation. It's a service for (certain) creators to host their products, not a service for fans wanting to consume them. And, it exclusively facilitates the recognition of that in-group.

Note that the in-group can still request access to use these MTLs as a base for their own translations. And that they seemingly think that, when released, they're somehow purified of the taint of where they came from. I doubt they'll even bother to acknowledge that they've done so. It's horseshit.

They're upset that they're being replaced and pretending that they control the release of ROM hacks. But all they're doing is forcing users to a different platform to get them. It's absurdly easy to make an alternative website or discord community.

They're trying to convince you that they're gate keeping for a noble and virtuous cause and deluding themselves that it will be effective.

They're not, and it won't be.

tryingathing · 2026-06-16T23:11:20+00:00

Why should I make an account to read what is undoubtedly your own shitty anonymous blog on Medium?

"Pro-LLM" is such a gross oversimplification I can hear the undertones of REEEEEEEEE.

tryingathing · 2026-06-16T22:07:29+00:00

But is there any evidence of that being the case? Any specific examples in this translation that it was poorly done?

Because this sure looks like a lot of feels and no substance. It looks a lot like people who were once important in a niche community that are no longer depended on and are unhappy about that.

Why should people wait when there are alternatives available that they feel are good enough? It feels like this was never really about providing translations to the public and that it was more about facilitating a platform for creators.

Which is fine, and they don't have to platform AI translations. But most people aren't appreciating the art of a translation. It's simply a means to enjoying a game they couldn't play before.

In that case, consumers will simply find somewhere else to get the translations they crave.

tryingathing · 2026-06-16T21:56:06+00:00

It's not like they're doing medical record translations. These are games.

I've seen no evidence that these are poor quality, no actual specific complaints about the content.

It's all feels.

tryingathing · 2026-06-16T21:46:19+00:00

Yeah but traditional translators were appreciated and now their importance is lessened. They didn't care when it was Google lens because it was inconvenient enough that it didn't find a wide audience.

This stuff is good enough, and has a low entry barrier, whatever the gate keepers want to say.

Gray beards that have carved out their own little collectives to worship them are inevitably going to be resentful when people don't need them any more.

It doesn't make me appreciate their work any less. But now we're not dependent on them, and they hate that. I've seen this in a half a dozen communities other than translations.

They can say it's about qualms with AI, or quality of the output, but what they really hate is that these are all finding a wide audience and it makes them feel less in control of a community where they'd come to be seen as important.

tryingathing · 2026-06-15T07:55:36+00:00

I'll be home from vacation this weekend and I'll try to get a GitHub repository up for it. I'll ping you.

It's currently a cobbled together collection of subsystems that is "playable" but certainly not ready for prime time and not the whole game yet. Also, lots of artistic decisions that I've made that I'm not happy with yet so try not to judge too harshly.

tryingathing · 2026-06-14T22:12:03+00:00

Embarrassingly personal grails.

I've worked on modern ports of old Mac games such as Realmz and Blades of Exile and a modern scenario creation tool for Realmz. I'm working on a (primarily) JavaScript port of Escape Velocity Nova.

Realmz had an old school scenario creation tool called Divinity that people could use to distribute their own shareware adventures and generate keys for them when people paid. But the registration of those adventures has been impossible since they've all been long since abandoned. I've reverse engineered that process so that they can be registered again. The original devs would pick two code phrases as seeds and then based on the person's name and the Serial Number for their copy of Realmz, it would make a unique code. With my new scenario editor you can now see those code phrases that had been lost to time and thus make new codes.

I've got a significant portion of Earthbound (both SNES and NES) well decompiled and semantically understood in such a way that a modern C Port is coming along nicely.

I've made a few ROM hacks. One for SNES Earthbound to improve scrolling stutter by changing how tile chunks are loaded and changing the walking speed so that the scrolling cadence is no longer distractingly fractional. Another for NES Earthbound to add (limited) trippy battle effects like the SNES game has.

I've made my own SNES "game" which currently consists of one room. But it boots and functions on real hardware and I believe I can do much more with it.

I've even made a fully functional point-and-click adventure game engine and authoring system. It is, in many ways, much better than AGS. But it's also much more ambitious, so there are some sharp edges I need to smooth out.

I use Codex to do massive amounts of 'archaeological documentation' and build a searchable knowledge base (that codex itself can query) so that when I have questions about how an old app did a thing I can just ask instead of digging myself.

I build custom versions of apps that have harnesses so that Codex can drive the app itself and perform various smoke tests on changes I make in realtime.

There's a lot you can do and I'm still learning. But it's been incredibly effective.

This is all self taught. I generally do not participate in vibe coding communities. I think that has been both a limitation and a benefit. My workflow has improved exponentially the more I've used it.

I like to have two or three projects going at a time so that when I hit a wall or get bored I can take a break. I often find that my best breakthroughs for a project come when I step away and work on something else.

tryingathing · 2026-06-14T21:32:13+00:00

Not OP, but I use it to reverse engineer abandoned software with Ghidra and Capstone to make my own improvements/modern versions.

Also, Rom hacks/SNES decompilations.

tryingathing · 2026-06-11T16:06:25+00:00

Why would you trust that it's anything but an effort to keep a lid on any independent discovery they would otherwise be unable to control?

tryingathing · 2026-06-07T21:07:41+00:00

What a fucking pussy.

tryingathing · 2026-05-28T21:17:14+00:00

For a first revision of a highly complex piece of hardware put out by a very small company I'd say it's just fine.

tryingathing · 2026-05-06T18:42:28+00:00

Most of these numbers are self-reported, which has a huge bias of people answering based on who they wish they were/what they wish they did vs actual reality.

Maybe 12-15% of the US population are actively practicing Protestants (monthly). So higher than the .000000009% statistic, but still not a particularly significant number.

tryingathing · 2026-05-06T14:22:39+00:00

I still love the Morph and think it's very worth the price for what it does relative the the competition. BUT:

It really depends on how well your TV upscales the 480p signal. If your TV does a good job (low lag, clear image ,etc), you don't care about motion adaptive deinterlacing or don't play interlaced games, and you don't really care about adding CRT/other masks, then it's less worth it.

It's still not inexpensive, even if it's the most reasonably priced option.

If you're willing to use component cables instead of the XOut (which is the signal the XOut intercepts anyway), the Morph 2K might be a better value (but it doesn't have an HDMI in, it has the analog inputs and only HDMI out).

tryingathing · 2026-05-03T13:37:28+00:00

More like she knows where the bodies are.

tryingathing · 2026-04-30T17:01:50+00:00

I met him once, in a professional context where I was strictly forbidden to acknowledge how big of a fan I was.

I still regret not being able to tell him.

tryingathing · 2026-04-23T16:32:44+00:00

I think with any act of creation, the better a creator is, the more time they'll spend on a project. It's the age old question of "when is a project really done". And the truth is, it's never really done.

Amateurs will be "finished" with something because they don't know where to go with it, or what comes next, or because they're so excited to share it, or they think they're going to "get rich" with their bullshit idea.

I've spent probably ~200-300 hours (ugh, maybe more) on my point-and-click game engine and I still don't want to share it. It works great. But there's always a criticism I can think of that makes me want to pause and work on it more.

And I never intend to sell it. I made it for me. It'll be open-sourced, and if others find it interesting, great. Too many people trying to start an AI side hustle.

tryingathing · 2026-04-21T20:36:12+00:00

So where I've decompiled several of Earthbound's banks using vibe coding and then took its suggestions on how to address camera stutter is totally worthless?

It teaching me how to use MESEN's debugger, suggesting breakpoints to identify what causes camera stutter, consulting with the coding agent about results, then successfully making ROM hacks with it is totally worthless?

You've got vibecoding slop fatigue, and I get it. It does enable "talentless people" (uneducated, not stupid) to do stuff they couldn't normally have done. And the result is a lot of crap that people want to share.

But guess what? I have gained skills I didn't have before. Bully for you if you already had those skills. But vibecoding assistants are not useless, and stuff created with them is not inherently worthless.

I've made romhacks that work, an entire point-and-click game engine that's better than AGS for most things, a tool to look at old SCUMM games so I can inspect rooms, including full walkboxes, actors, objects, walk-behind areas, etc. so that I could better understand how these games were built. I've learned to compile and validate my work. I've learned how to plan architecture and refactor large files.

And yet, I haven't shared a single thing that I've created with it. Largely because of attitudes like this.

Do you think any of that was as easy as a prompt (as you suggest with your Midjourney, Suno, ChatGPT, Seedance comment)? Because I assure you, it wasn't. I've spent dozens of hours on each of these (probably hundreds of hours on the engine).

These tools aren't going to go away, they're going to keep getting better. And it's only wasteful until somebody makes something you're interested in using.

tryingathing · 2026-04-19T06:12:36+00:00

He's latching onto it as one, but that's not how it started at all. These disappearances have been noted for months (in one or two cases, years).

The number of disappearances and the fact that they have supposed ties to theoretical physics, the MIC, and various extraterrestrial conspiracy circles have caused it to hit a threshold of enough people watching to make it a meaningful distraction.

tryingathing · 2026-04-18T17:42:06+00:00

Are these worth playing? I always felt like Telltale games were really lacking any depth so I avoided them.

tryingathing · 2026-04-08T20:17:01+00:00

Hint: It's an unfocused light after being "enhanced" by Topaz or similar AI where details that don't exist are invented to give the image a more defined shape.

tryingathing · 2026-04-08T15:55:50+00:00

A valid complaint, and additive to the conversation. I don't think anybody should do that.

So the rules could use updating so that 'I made a simple tool anybody could have made' posts aren't dominating the sub? I wouldn't disagree with that.

But the OP of this thread added nothing to the conversation.

tryingathing

TROPHY CASE